What have we learned courtesy of the Brexit ding-dong? At the moment of writing flexed muscles and jitters are hardening into suspicions of sell out but where those will lead is still unclear.
Rolling news and tweeting showed the jitters feeding each other. Jim Allister at 12.27 decided that ‘no regulatory convergence’ was ‘a stepping stone to a united Ireland’. What unionist leader can withstand one-man-band Allister, the exaggeration for effect of a scary barrister?
Not a country solicitor, for sure. True to form a shaken-sounding Arlene Foster at 2pm claimed the Irish government was trying to ‘unilaterally change the Belfast Agreement without our consent’. She was also insistent on what Theresa May had promised, and shortly after took a call from May, still in a long-drawn out lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker.
Not long after May and Juncker announced there would be no deal on Monday.
Whatever becomes of the May-DUP relationship, however much or little the wildest Brexiteers kick up and how much survives of the draft Dublin believed early yesterday that it had tied down, some outcomes will endure.
Simon Coveney has had a good run this past while, serious and direct where Leo Varadkar is smooth, substantial where the other sounds superficial. Defending the stubborn and shameless Frances Fitzgerald won Coveney party marks as loyal, even as outsiders winced at the sight. Another mis-step, which many southern politics-watchers will not have clocked, came when he regretted the absence of a DUP-SF executive to provide a northern voice on the Brexit negotiations.
Coveney has been up close to the Stormont ‘talks’. He knows better than anyone else in the Dublin government how far any imaginable DUP-SF combination would be from providing an agreed position on a post-Brexit north. Few can know better how impossible a single Stormont voice is on Brexit, or the border.
Neither unionists nor republicans can admit it but Coveney has been negotiating for them too. Or as he put it to Andrew Marr on Sunday, he has been exercising his ‘responsibility to represent interests on the island of Ireland north and south.’ This caused major offence, fed by Scary Jim.
It may even have constituted Arlene’s ‘unilateral’ change of the Belfast Agreement ‘without our consent’. Well, she was rattled, no time to spot an unnecessary word. Unionists, like republicans and like Brexiters are on betrayal-watch most if not all of the time. By contrast, if the EU have failed to stand over a painfully-written draft it will be a surprise, and a wallop to the self-esteem of Fine Gael’s two front-men, because their support has been so vocal.
It is probably true to say however that a EU last-minute swivel will not damage Varadkar and Coveney in the eyes of their party or the patchwork coalition government. Unlike the affair of the emails as handled by Fitzgerald – and by Charlie Flanagan – then bungled by Varadkar before he settled into stubborn defence of Fitzgerald, which has left scars mainly for giving points to Micheál Martin. But in the Brexit fight this far the Fine Gael duo’s performance has looked pretty good at home.
If it turns out that Donald Tusk in Dublin over-stated the ‘le chéile’ (together) bit there will be delight in the DUP, until the next test of May’s nerve and busted authority. What sustains unionism is siege-spirit, keeping its believers keen and battle-ready, arguably also blocking any inclination to rethink, even to modify. (You could say the same of republicans when locked into war, unable to think beyond aggression and denial/defensiveness.)
Nobody with any political credibility accepts the unionist accusation that Varadkar-Coveney tore up an Enda Kenny nice-guy script and started playing rough. Indeed Kenny might do the decent thing now, and come out to say Varadkar has done no more than hold the line at a tougher time. Though even the DUP grassroots surely noticed that Varadkar who won Foster smiles only became a bad guy recently. Smiley Enda would have been pilloried if he’d still been around as the border came sharply into focus.
As for Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson, and those charges that Varadkar-Coveney are chasing Sinn Féin votes, these are probably recognised in the south as beyond unionist paranoia, explicable only as a form of Tory ignorance about Ireland and the Irish that is bottomless.
As yesterday’s drama revved up RTE’s Tony Connelly, the experts’ expert, quoted an EU source on the need for ‘hard, concrete and credible assurances from the British’. Indeed. No wonder it was a testing day.
